Constructing the future of a scientific field - high-energy physics a...

Among the sciences, physics has been especially acknowledged by philosophers for producing theories whose novel predictions – novel both in the sense of “new” and in the sense of “unexpected” (Leplin 2004) – have been repeatedly confirmed by empirical evidence. The notion of prediction in physics has, however, most often been restricted to the inferential resources of the semantic content of its theories, rather than the aim to say something about the future, least to inform policy decisions. Here is an example: “While the masses of the supersymmetric partner particles are not predicted a priori, naturalness requires that the supersymmetric partners of the top quark, the Higgs bosons and the gluino should have masses not much larger than a TeV – and therefore in the range accessible at the LHC.” (ATLAS 2011, 95) While the first part of the sentence makes predictions about the apparently atemporal, universal realm of physics entities, the second part introduces a predicted feature of the actual apparatus - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

In this talk, I show how the high-energy physics community infrastructures the future of its field by creating conditions for generating and confirming predictions with the help of novel technologies. These technologies include model-independent, data-driven experimental searches largely dependent on machine learning. Future detectors and colliders are planned based on the envisaged physics goals, while the physics goals are constrained and steered by the feasibility and the predicted performance of the available and expected future technologies.

The talk details the physics-engineering work involved in the upgrade of a subsystem of the ATLAS detector at CERN’s LHC. Based on qualitative interviews with researchers involved in the design, evaluation, and implementation of a detector upgrade, I bring forth the overlaps and intertwinements of the material, social, and theoretical ontologies of high-energy physics, drawing on concepts of genealogical change and unfolding of the object (Knorr Cetina 1995, 1999). While keeping the epistemic ends in sight, often portrayed as uncovering further bits of microphysical reality, the physicists need to “get the reality in” – in terms of what is, or will be, achievable. This comes down to the types of connectors, the length of optical fiber cables, or securing cooling, powering, and radiation hardness of the components. They will need to last for another twelve years, until the envisaged end of the High-Luminosity LHC operation in 2034. The high-energy physics community thus emerges as a community of not only inferential prediction, but a temporal one as well – a prediction of its predictive, experimental, material, computational, and technological capacities, and thereby of its possible future(s).

References:

ATLAS Collaboration. 2011. Letter of Intent – Phase I Upgrade. CERN.

Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1995. “How Superorganisms Change: Consensus Formation and the Social Ontology of High-Energy Physics Experiments”, Social Studies of Science, Vol.25: 119-47.

Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures. Harvard University Press.

Leplin, Jarrett. 2004. “A Theory’s Predictive Success Can Warrant Belief in the Unobservable Entities It Postulates”, in Christopher Hitchcock (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science. 117-32.